Mississippi Sharecropper Facts - My Discovery

Really... its a way to verbalize what I suspected, heard tell of by my daddy and uncles from Mississippi...

The Leflore County Massacre and the Demise of the Colored Farmers' Alliance   by William F. Holmes

Phylon (1960-)
Vol. 34, No. 3 (3rd Qtr., 1973), pp. 267-274
Published by: Clark Atlanta University
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/274185

 

The troubles in Leflore County sprang largely from the attempts by blacks to improve themselves financially…. At that time the South was overwhelmingly rural, and for many years the farmers of that region had suffered from such problems as rising costs, falling prioces and rural isolation….. 

 

While some blacks owned small farms, many more worked as sharecroppers or field hands for white planters.  With many of them living at a bare subsistence level, the black farmers, more than any other group in American History, resembled the peasant classes in the poorest European nations of the nineteenth century (1800’s)

 

Leflore County, located in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, was in one of the last sections of Mississippi to be settled.  In the 1880;s thousands of Negroes and whites began migrating into the lowland region, clearing forests from vast acres and planting them with cotton.  The building of railroads, the beginning of federal flood control programs, and a a relative stabilization of cotton prices accounted for the Delta boom of the 1880’s.

 

Some hill people wrote off the entire Delta as a swamp – but they were wrong.  The sprawling lowland region was so blessed with miles and miles of dark, rich soil – soil so rich that its cotton yield per acre exceeded that of all other regions in the US. 

  Leflore Cty is adjacent to Holmes MS !!!

 

As plantations came to dominate the Delta’s economy, the whites strove hard to attract Negro laborers to work their lands, and a a result the blacks greatly outnumbered the whites.    In Leflore County, for example, there were 14,276 blacks and 2,597 whites.